We have just finished adding a backup server to our Tutorial Subscription System, so that if the main server your tutorials are served from ever goes down, your Tutorial Viewer will automatically switch to looking at the backup server to serve your tutorials. This will result in your tutorials always being available to your customers, even if our main system is down. Our intention is that as the subscription service grows in popularity, we'll be able to easily add more servers to the system in different parts of the world... thus making things that much faster for everyone subscribed to the system. In addition, those DemoWolf clients who are located closer to our backup server than our main server, can opt to reverse the order of servers... and have our UK server act as their main server, and our Chicago server be their backup.
ACTION REQUIRED BY EXISTING SUBSCRIBERS:
Note: The following MUST be done prior to Friday morning 8:00am EST June 25, 2010. The reason is because we are taking our main server down for 10 minutes sometime between 8:00am and 8:30am Friday morning, for a critical update. Failure to do the following will result in 10 minutes of "Tutorial Unavailability" from your website. If you DO follow this procedure, then our backup server will serve your tutorials to your customers while our main server is down.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:
If you have already signed up for a subscription and set up your Tutorial Viewer, you need to re-download the Tutorial Viewer from My Subscriptions and upload a few of the files that have been updated:
- Upload all files contained in the includes/ directory except for conf.new.php.
- If you have never modified your conf.php file, simply rename conf.new.php to conf.php and upload it, overwriting your existing configuration file.
- If you have modified your conf.php file, first open up includes/conf.new.php. The format of this file has changed slightly. You will need to re-apply any changes you have made to this new file. After making your changes, save the file, rename it to conf.php, and then upload it, overwriting your existing configuration file.
For all existing subscribers... If you do not update your Tutorial Viewer and its conf.php file, you will experience downtime when we take our main system down Friday morning.
Nothing else needs to be done. Your tutorials have already been copied over to the new server for you. The next time you generate your tutorials, the updated files will automatically be copied over to the backup server as soon as generation is complete. In addition, any new subscriptions ordered from today onward will already have these changes implemented.
Thank you for your time. Please let me know if you have any questions.
